Walking through South Oakland every morning, I see the same couple of things. I see college students sitting and talking on their front porches, trash cans stuffed with bulging garbage bags, empty cans of alcohol from the night before and glass bottles scattered on the sidewalk. The sights and smells of garbage are everywhere, yet I never see anyone try to fix Oakland’s waste issue.
It is almost impressive to see how much trash college students make after only a couple of weeks here. When students moved in for the start of the semester, I saw more waste than ever before. There are pizza boxes, takeout containers, broken furniture and pieces of cardboard boxes disintegrating and becoming one with the sidewalk.
At some point, South Oakland stopped looking like a beautiful historic neighborhood and started looking like an actual dump. While there are many factors to blame for this ongoing problem, like South O slumlords and a lack of public trash cans and subpar trash collection, we need to be honest about the biggest contributor to it all — us…